March 24, 1995

By Jeffery Kahn

To see how quickly the Information Age is unfolding, you
need look back only three years. In the blink of an eye, electronic mail and
portable phones have become commonplace, and 25 million people have linked up
to the Internet.

What has emerged, says John Mayo, recently retired president of AT&T Bell
Labs, is a new global information industry that today is worth $1 trillion, and
is growing at a rate of eight to 10 percent a year.

Mayo -- he spoke at LBL on March 15 as part of the Science and Technology in a
Competitive World lecture series -- says the information infrastructure has been
evolving since time immemorial toward a goal finally realized in the 1990s.
Today, humans can instantaneously share sound, data, and images from any place
on the globe. At the same time, he said, half the people in the world still
have not made their first phone call.

Mayo, a 36-year veteran of Bell Labs, says a convergence of
factors -- technology, global competition, and the marketplace--account for the
sudden and revolutionary changes in the communications industry. He says
suppliers drove the market until the explosion of technology that occurred in
the 1980s. This richness of technology and global competition put the customer
in the driver's seat. Suddenly, the customer was able to choose from among many
competitive products and services.

"If you think about it," he said, "perhaps the major impact Japan has had on
our society is that it allowed customers to have choices. When they chose
Japanese products, the effect on American industry was dramatic. It responded
with a new generation of services of products."

Industry cannot survive by paying lip service to the customer. In fact, says
Mayo, the new industrial model for how to do R&D begins and ends with the
customer. Today, you must talk to the customer before starting research, not
after the completion of development. The customer must be an integral part of a
team that includes engineers and marketing people whose efforts must be
concurrent, not sequential as in the past.

"Almost everything in the field is built by some combination of these
technologies," he said. "Individually, these technologies are a decade or two
from exhaustion in terms of enhancements and improvements. In combination, they
will continue to revolutionize products and services."

Mayo traced the roots of these changes back to the 1960s, when industry changed
its design processes. The 1970s was a decade when analog systems were replaced
by digital. In the 1980s, with the breakup of AT&T, the telecommunications
industry was reorganized. This led to the current blending and merging of the
phone, cable, television, computer, and electronics industries.

Mayo predicts that by the turn of the century, the cascade of changes rocking
the communication industry will have its most profound effect. The new products
and services just now coming into our lives will result, he said, in the
"re-engineering of our very way of life."

The Science and Technology in a Competitive World lecture series is jointly
sponsored by LBL and UC Berkeley.